At present, communications networks are being exposed to various forms of attack, seeking to block access to, or bring down, particular nodes, entities, or sites in the communication network. These are commonly known as Excessive Operations attacks in either wired (Internet) or wireless networks, wherein a large number of short, concurrent messages are sent to a particular network node. Consequently, the node is hit with a flood of messages within a very short time period. However, the node is unable to process or respond to all these messages in this short time period causing a denial-of-service (DoS). As a result, communications with the node may collapse completely, i.e. the node crashes, stops beaconing, dis-adopts from its network switch, or at the very least the flood of unauthorized messages serves to block legitimate users from accessing the node.
One solution to these attacks is to “blacklist” the Stations that are causing these excessive operations. However, memory capacity is an obvious issue here. In addition, this solution is not scalable since an offender can create millions of Authentication requests very quickly by rotating source Media Access Control (MAC) addresses using the whole range of available MAC addresses.
Accordingly, there is a need to mitigate the detrimental effects of the above described Excessive Operations attacks.
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The apparatus and method components have been represented where appropriate by conventional symbols in the drawings, showing only those specific details that are pertinent to understanding the embodiments of the present invention so as not to obscure the disclosure with details that will be readily apparent to those of ordinary skill in the art having the benefit of the description herein.